Many, many years ago, Oprah Winfrey stoked the fires of the first Satanic panic by inviting clearly disturbed people on her show to talk about how they had uncovered repressed memories of so-called Satanic Ritual Abuse. One of these was "Michelle Smith," of the Satanic panic ur-text Michelle Remembers.
It is therefore a tad ironic that Oprah herself is now the subject of many of these conspiracy theories and often referenced as being in cahoots with the global Satanic child sex trafficking cabal, if not partially in charge of it, along with Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton. Would this all even be a thing now if she had just been a tad more skeptical?
Oprah's protegé, Dr. Phil McGraw, does not appear to have learned all that much from her mistakes.
This week, one of his guests was a woman whose daughter has been missing for four years. A loss like that is unimaginably horrible and none of us can know, truly, what she is going through unless we have been through it ourselves. You can't really fault anyone in that situation for going a little off the deep end, or for acting in ways we might not normally consider to be rational. It's why "psychics" make so much money off of people with missing children.
Sherrie Woodle of Wenatchee, Washington, has dedicated her life to finding out what happened to her daughter Jessie Grace Rubio-Montejano (AKA Jessie Grace Moore), who disappeared four years ago at the age of 24. Woodle's other daughter Brittany is concerned her mom is going too far and putting herself in danger. Woodle has taken to dressing up "as a gang member" and going out with multiple guns and knives strapped to her body in order to "get in" with the gangs and hopefully get information on what happened to her daughter.
'My Mom Has A Gangster Persona That's Completely Taken Over Her Life,' Says Young Womanwww.youtube.com
If it were just that, it would be just another Dr. Phil show. We'd get why her daughter was concerned for her safety, and we'd get why she felt she had to do whatever it took to get information on her other daughter's disappearance. We'd just feel bad for the whole family in general.
But it's not just that. In addition to believing gangs and a corrupt police force were involved in her daughter's disappearance, Woodle has become convinced Jessie Grace was taken as part of a Satanic cult's ritual, tortured, sacrificed and harvested for adrenochrome.
Woman Claims Missing Daughter Was 'Tortured For The Drug Adrenochrome'youtu.be
She explained what she believes to Dr. Phil:
My investigation has revealed that this is all linked to a ritual. I believe someone in an occult was drugging my daughter Jessie for up to a year before she went missing. I believe she was killed June 20th 2016 because it was a full moon and the summer solstice at the same time, and then the next day was Lilith. Lilith is a holiday that the occult does celebrate and it requires a human sacrifice.
I had a person say to me that if I looked around at the environment and looked at the seasons, I would see a pattern. And as I looked and did more research, realized that it was very specific in that people went missing on very specific days throughout the year. [...]
I believe that Jessie was tortured for the drug adrenochrome. Adrenochrome is a chemical that our body produces when we are extremely fearful or have a lot of distress. It gives you strength, it gives you vitality. And the people that killed Jessie are harvesting that from other people. And when you drink it, it gives you euphoria and power.
Woodle then claimed that someone had also told her there was a video of Jessie's murder and the burning of her body in a barrel, and that people were passing it around at parties all over town, but that she hadn't seen it. Then she said the police said they had it and that she had seen a little bit of it. The police say they've never seen it.
First of all, Lilith is not a pagan holiday. Lilith, in Jewish mythology, is Adam's first wife. Litha is a pagan holiday celebrating the summer solstice and it does not, in fact, require a human sacrifice. I assume it only requires some crystals, flower wreaths and a copy of Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. Wait, no, that's the Lilith Fair.
Second, adrenochrome is not a "drug." It doesn't do anything Woodle or any of the conspiracists who believe in it say it does. Its primary use in medicine is to speed up blood clotting. You can buy it online. Decades ago, doctors thought an overproduction of it might be responsible for schizophrenia, which, along with its very cool sounding name, is probably why it became a popular "fake drug" in books like A Clockwork Orange and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That theory has since been abandoned.
Dr. Phil's entire pushback on this, at least in the part they put online, was that the police department said they'd never heard of it.
That would all be good and well if Woodle were the only person who believed in this nonsense, but she's not. The comment section was filled with loads of people who also believe this crap.
It's one thing to treat someone in a lot of pain with compassion, it's another to just gloss over something like this.
Dr. Phil, who is not an actual practicing doctor anymore, missed a valuable opportunity to not only give this poor woman one less thing to worry about, but to either get through to some people at home who believe in this crap, or to at least inoculate others who might then be less susceptible to falling for it. People are out there committing crimes because they believe in this, and he can't take two seconds on his show to explain — or have a scientist explain — that what they believe is scientifically impossible? Really?
And to title the segment "Woman Claims Missing Daughter Was 'Tortured For The Drug Adrenochrome'" and then post it on YouTube with nothing explaining that this is not a thing is just straight up irresponsible.
Quite frankly, it should be shows like Dr. Phil doing this kind of debunking. It shouldn't be people like me or anyone else doing this work right now, because there is pretty much no chance that the people who most need to know that it is bullshit are reading anything we write. It should be on daytime television and whatever else these people might watch. There should be a standard public service announcement featuring a scientist explaining how this is bullshit.
This conspiracy and all of the others that go along with it are dangerous. It's not like leaving a bowl of cream out for the fairies or believing in aliens or that the moon landing never happened or that there was a second shooter at JFK's assassination or that Elvis is alive. We have lived through "people with magical powers who love Satan are harming children!" enough times to know that it does not end well or even harmlessly.
[Dr. Phil]
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